Supremely bad decision, part 3

All the attention these past couple of weeks on films depicting actual animal cruelty reminds me of something from my past. That the “Stevens” (in the Supreme Court’s cockeyed ruling in U.S. v. Stevens) was advocating (sadly, with success) for what he argued was his constitionally protected right to sell videos of illegal dog fighting is, I’m sure, the real prod for this memory now resurfacing. (For more about the Court ruling, see my posts here of Tuesday April 27 and Wednesday April 21.)

This story goes back 15 years or more; I can’t quite recall the year. I was involved in locating expert witnesses to assist in the prosecution phase of what had been a successful covert investigation of a dog fighting ring. As with all such things, there’s a whole lot of horror (what people do to these animals) and hurry-up-and-wait (what the courts do with these cases), but the specifics of most investigations tend to blend somewhat together after a certain number of years. Some, like this one, just stand out, usually for one or perhaps a few details even more extreme than in most cases. And this one stands out because of a film.

Over the course of the investigation which led to the prosecution, a very brave and clever person had managed to sneak in a video camera to record the organized dog fights which were the target. Reviewing the video with the investigators was never easy, although it was something I watched over and over, and I can remember one sequence as if it is playing now in front of me. Here it is, a picture painted as well as I can with words…

In the grainy, grey-and-white home video quality of the early 1990s, we see two big dark dogs ripping into each other. They are evenly matched in size and strength. They hold onto each other, mouth’s clamped down hard and fast onto each other. They wrestle in that hold, each struggling without success to topple the other. This goes on for long minutes until, obviously exhausted, the two dogs collapse into a heap.

Like any two dogs in a heap, amazingly, the two rest their heads on each other. They breathe together, in and out, the same rhythm, deep breathing with open mouths, tired lungs. Their eyes are almost impossible to make out in these grainy images, but it’s easy to imagine them mostly closed, not asleep. They are so very tired.

Then the men in the video start to prod and kick the dogs. Not hard enough to do them further real damage, only hard enough to stir them. There is no sound, but it’s clear from their gestures that they are urging the dogs to stand again, to get back to their battle. And the dogs, being dogs, being animals who listen to men, animals who listen to men even when it is against their own self interest and survival, the dogs begin to fight again. More slowly than before, more obviously now in pain, more sadly, they move pathetically rather than with ferocity, but still they fight on.

I assume that this film never made it out of the prosecutor’s office, at least I hope not. If it did, I suppose it could have made it to the hands of Mr Stevens, the man who just won this Supreme Court case allowing him to legally sell such images for a profit.